Brian May: act now to stop asteroids destroying humanity

An asteroid large enough to destroy a city hits Earth once every hundred years

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Queen guitarist Brian May has warned that our obliteration is inevitable unless we take the threat of asteroid impacts seriously. May, who has PHD in astrophysics, called for a global effort to ensure a 100-fold increase in the detection and monitoring of asteroids.

His concerns have been echoed by royal astronomer Martin Rees and a group of more than 100 prominent physicists, artists and business leaders including Richard Dawkins, Brian Cox and Peter Gabriel.

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The group have co-signed a declaration demanding increased use of technology to detect and track near-Earth asteroids and better discovery and tracking of new asteroid threats. An asteroid big enough to destroy an entire city is likely to hit Earth once every 100 years, it has been estimated.

Referencing the asteroid explosion in Tunguska, Russia in 1908, May said it would only take one big impact to wipe us all out: "We are currently aware of less than one percent of objects comparable to the one that impacted at Tunguska, and nobody knows when the next big one will hit."

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The Tunguska event, where an asteroid exploded 4-6 miles above the Earth's surface, was still powerful enough to destroy an area roughly 800 square miles in size with shockwaves felt as far away as the UK.

Royal astronomer Martin Rees added that the human race must make it "our mission to find asteroids before they find us".

The first World Asteroid Day will take place on 30 June 2015, the anniversary of the Tunguska explosion. Founding partners include The Planetary Society and California Academy of Sciences. Events will take place around the world to help raise awareness of the threat posed by asteroids.

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Astronaut Edward Lu told WIRED.co.uk that using existing technology it would be possible to detect asteroids "many decades" in advance and then "run into them with a small spacecraft" to deflect them off course. He added that it was important to find these objects while they were still billions of miles from Earth.

Sentinel, a privately-funded space telescope that will go into orbit around the Sun in 2019, uses infrared cameras to hunt out asteroids as small as 40 metres across. Such small objects are likely to hit the Earth once every 100 years and are powerful enough to destroy a whole city.

Lu explained that if an asteroid 150 metres across hit the Earth it would have five times the explosive force of all the bombs used in World War 2 -- including the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Referencing the 1998 Hollywood blockbuster Armageddon, Lu said: "If you find something weeks beforehand, there's not much you can do."